Kleiner Brahms Esoteric

Alexander Melnikov’s recent, excellent set of the Shostakovich 24 Preludes and Fugues (currently nominated for the BBC Music Magazine Awards) demonstrated eloquently that he was no slavish follower of performing tradition. This new disc of Brahms’s earliest surviving piano works shows his questing musicality in another way. In an absorbing booklet essay on Brahms’s pianos and pianism, Melnikov cites the copious (and contradictory) evidence of how Brahms played, and what pianos he used and favoured. Brahms’s partiality for Steinways and Streichers is well attested, as is his admiration for Bösendorfer’s instruments, and Melnikov has opted here for an 1875 Bösendorfer even though, as he comments, it is ‘notoriously difficult to play and to regulate’, shortcomings ‘compensated by the beauty and nobility of its sound’. Those qualities, along with immediacy of attack, agile articulation and individuation of registers, are admirably well caught in this recording: no matter that none of these works were played on such an instrument when they were new. Melnikov shows himself a formidable Brahmsian, and the piano’s ‘nobility’ is best displayed in the surging grandeur he brings to the finale of the C major and the intensely sensitive readings of both sonatas’ variation-form slow movements.

GRAMOPHONE Magazine Editor's Choice - October 2015.The Artemis Quartet pairs Brahms’ intense first quartet with his lighter-spirited third quartet, both works that the Artemis’ cellist, Eckart Runge, describes as “remarkable and multi-faceted”. He says that “Brahms marries a Romantic spirit with the structure and forms of Classicism. There is an almost symphonic approach in the writing, but at the same time the quartets are imbued with a sense of warmth, immediacy, friendship and love that is interwoven with a more spiritual, timeless beauty”.

Thoughtful, sensitive playing in slow movements, lively tempi in allegros, characteristic musicianship plus spontaneity combine to make these recordings highly recommendable throughout…

Few musical partnerships have elicited such divergent critical opinions as Maurizio Pollini and Claudio Abbado in Brahms’s two piano concertos. Reviewing the First Concerto in April 1999, Richard Osborne found ‘a lack of quickness and intelligence in the inner-part playing’ while missing ‘any real sense of interaction between soloist and orchestra’. A year earlier Bryce Morrison, in his review of the Second Concerto, had found it ‘impossible to think of them apart, their unity [here] is so indissoluble’. BM also praised what he heard as ‘a granitic reading stripped of all surplus gesture, preening mannerism or overt display, intent only on the unveiling of a musical or moral truth’.

Bruno Walter is a conductor who knew how to stamp the works he conducted and recorded, especially those from the religious repertory, with the seal of his warm poetic sensitivity and his radiant humanity. Through these scores, he manages to communicate his vision to us, and, without ever forcing an already strong text, without false sentiment or gratuitous effect, he leaves us room for a more personal interpretation of the music. Brahms composed his Requiem at the beginning of his career, at under thirty-five- the age at which Mozart died (this means that both composers wrote their Requiems at about the same age).

This album features two major artists, past and present: Johannes Brahms and Arabella Steinbacher. However, even the best of artists have their less than perfect moments or works. These three sonatas, as played hereby Steinbacher and Kulek, come across as less exciting, lesser works by Brahms. The Sonata No. 1 sounds rather anemic as it begins (partly because of the recording quality), but Steinbacher chooses to play without much fullness or vibrato, even though she is playing a Stradivarius.

The old model for creating a hit classical recording – big-name soloist plus big-name conductor in major repertory work – is not so common anymore, but this live Brahms recording from the Staatskapelle Berlin under Venezuela's Gustavo Dudamel, with Argentine-Israeli-Palestinian-Spanish pianist Daniel Barenboim as soloist, shows that there's life in the concept yet. One could point to the virtues of pianist and conductor separately: it's a rare septuagenarian who can combine power and clear articulation of detail the way Barenboim does, and Dudamel builds a vast sweep in, especially, the Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15. But it's the way that the two work together that really makes news. Chalk it up to shared South American heritage or to whatever the listener wants, but the way the orchestra and piano define separate spheres and work them together is extraordinary. Again, it is in the Piano Concerto No. 1 and its Beethovenian drama that their mutual understanding is most evident, but there is a sense of great variety powerfully unified throughout.

These two sonatas, originally written for clarinet, marked the end of an intense period of depression for Brahms, during which his creative energies had all but faded. Kim Kashkashian, whose command of the viola unearths an even deeper realm of possibility in this already engaging diptych, faithfully captures the somber circumstances of its creation. In doing so, she shows that the viola is no less an instrument of breath, drawing from deep within her lungs the sheer vocal power required to carry across such arresting music.